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Listen to me, please. Youre like me, a Homo sapiens, a wise human. Life, a miracle in the universe, appeared around four billion years ago, and we humans only 200,000 years ago. Yet we have succeeded in disrupting the balance that is so essential to life on Earth. Listen carefully to this extraordinary story, which is yours, and decide what you want to do with it.These are traces of our origins.At the beginning, our planet was no more than a chaos of fire, formed in the wake of its star, the sun. A cloud of agglutinated dust particles, similar to so many similar clusters in the universe. Yet this was where the miracle of life occurred. Today, life, our life, is just a link in a chain of innumerable living beings that have succeeded one another on Earth over nearly four billion years. And even today, new volcanoes continue to sculpt our landscapes. They offer a glimpse of what our Earth was like at its birth molten rock surging from the depths, solidifying, cracking, blistering or spreading in a thin crust, before fabling dormant for a time.These wreaths of smoke curling from the bowels of the Earth bear witness to the Earths original atmosphere. An atmosphere devoid of oxygen. A dense atmosphere, thick with water vapor, full of carbon dioxide. A furnace. But the Earth had an exceptional future, offered to it by water. At the right distance from the sun, not too far, not too near. The Earth was able to conserve water in liquid form. Water vapor condensed and fell in torrential downpours on Earth, and rivers appeared.The rivers shaped the surface of the Earth, cutting their channels, furrowing out valleys. They ran toward the lowest places on the globe to form the oceans. They tore minerals from the rocks, and gradually the freshwater of the oceans became heavy with salt. Water is a vital liquid.It irrigated these sterile expanses. The paths it traced are like the veins of a body, the branches of a tree, the vessels of the sap that it brought to the Earth. Nearly four billion years later, somewhere on Earth can still be found these works of art, left by the volcanoes ash, mixed with water from Icelands glaciers. There they are matter and water, water and matter soft and hard combined, the crucial alliance shared by every life-form on our planet. Minerals and metals are even older than the Earth. They are stardust. They provide the Earths colors. Red from iron, black from carbon, blue from copper, yellow from sulfur. Where do we come from?Where did life first spark into being? A miracle of time, primitive life-forms still exist in the golbes hot springs. They give them their colors. Theyre called archaeobacteria. They all feed off the Earths heat, all except the cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae. They alone have the capacity to turn to the sun to capture its energy. They are a vital ancestor of all yesterdays and todays plant species. These tiny bacteria and their billions of descendants changed the destiny of our planet. They transformed its atmosphere. What happened to the carbon that poisoned the atmosphere? Its still here, imprisoned in the Earths crust. We can read this chapter of the Earths history nowhere better than on the walls of Colorados Grand Canyon. They reveal nearby two billion years of the Earths history. Once upon a time, the Grand Canyon was a sea inhabited by microorganisms. They grew their shells by tapping into carbon from the atmosphere dissolved in the ocean. When they died, the shells sank and accumulated on the seabed. These strata are the product of those billions and billions of shells. Thanks to them, the carbon drained from the atmosphere, and other life-forms could develop. It is life that altered the atmosphere. Plant life fed off the suns energy, which enabled it to break apart the water molecule and take the oxygen. And oxygen filled the air. The Earths water cycle is a process of constant renewal. Waterfalls, water vapor, clouds, rain, springs, rivers, seas, oceans, glaciers. The cycle is never broken. Theres always the same quantity of water on Earth. All the successive species on Earth have drunk the same water. The astonishing matter that is water. One of the most unstable of all. It takes a liquid form as running water, gaseous as vapor or solid as ice. In Siberia, the frozen surfaces of the lakes in winter contain the traces of the forces that water deploys when it freezes. Lighter than water, the ice floats, rather than sinking to the bottom. It forms a protective mantle against the cold under which life can go on. The engine of life is linkage. Everything is linked. Nothing is self-sufficient. Water and air are inseparable, united in life and our life on Earth. Thus, clouds form over the oceans and bring rain to the landmasses, whose rivers carry water back to the oceans. Sharing is everything. The green expanse peeking through the clouds is the source of oxygen in the air. Seventy percent of this gas, without which our lungs cannot function, comes from the algae that tint the surface of the oceans. Our Earth relies on a balance in which every being has a role to play and exists only through the existence of another being. A subtle, fragile harmony that is easily shattered. Thus, corals are born from the marriage of algae and shells. The Great Barrier Reef, Off the coast of Australia, stretches over 350, 000 square kilometers and is home to 1,500 species of fish, 4,000 species of mollusks and 400 species of coral. The equilibrium of every ocean depends on these corals.The Earth counts time in billions of years. It took more than four billion years for it to make trees. In the chain of species, trees are a pinnacle, a perfect living sculpture. Trees defy gravity. They are the only natural element in perpetual movement toward the sky. They grow unhurriedly toward the sun that nourishes their foliage. They have inherited from those minuscule cyanobacteria the power to capture lights energy. They store it and feed off it, turning it into wood and leaves, which then decompose into a mixture of water, mineral, vegetable and living matter. And so, gradually, the soils that are indispensable to life are formed. Solis are the factory of biodiversity. They are a world of incessant activity where microorganisms feed, dig, aerate and transform. They make the humus, the fertile layer to which all life on land is linked. What do we know about life on Earth? How many species are we aware of? A 10th of them? A hundredth perhaps? What do we know about the bonds that link them? The Earth is a miracle. Life remains a mystery. Families of animals form, united by customs and rituals that survive today. Some adapt to the nature of their pasture, and their pasture adapts to them. And both gain. The animal sates its hunger, and the tree can blossom again. In the great adventure of life on Earth, every species has role to play, every species has its place. None is futile or harmful. They all balance out.And thats where you, Homo sapiens-“wise human”-enter the story. You benefit from a fabulous four-billion-year-old legacy bequeathed by the Earth. Youre only 200,000 years old, but you have changed the face of the world. Despite your vulnerability, you have taken possession of every habitat and conquered swaths of territory like no other species before you. After 180,000 nomadic years, and thanks to a more clement climate, humans settled down. They no longer depended on hunting for survival. They chose to live in wet environments that abounded in fish, game and wild plants. There, where land, water and life combine. Human genius inspired them to build canoes, an invention that opened up new horizons and turned humans into navigators. Even today, the majority of humankind lives on the continents coastlines or the banks of rivers and lakes. The first towns grew up less than 600 years ago. It was a considerable leap in human history. Why towns? Because they allowed humans to defend themselves more easily. They became social beings, meeting and sharing knowledge and crafts, blending their similarities and differences. In a word, they became civilized. But the only energy at their disposal was provided by nature and the strength of their bodies. It was the story of humankind for thousands of years. It still if for one person if four-over one and a half billion human beings-more than the combined population of all the wealthy nations. Taking from the Earth only the strictly necessary. For a long time, the relationship between humans and the planet was evenly balanced. For a long time, the economy seemed like a natural and equitable alliance. But life expectancy is short, and hard labor takes its toll. The uncertainties of nature weigh on daily life. Education is a rare privilege. Children are a familys only asset, as long as every extra pair of hands is a necessary contribution to its subsistence. The Earth feeds people, clothes them and provides for their daily needs. Everything comes from the Earth. Towns change humanitys nature, as well as its destiny. The farmer becomes a craftsman, trader or peddler. What the Earth gives the farmer, the city dweller buys, sells or barter. Goods change hands, along with ideas. Humanitys genius is to have always had a sense of its weakness. Humans tried to extend the frontiers of their territory, but they knew their limits. The physical energy and strength with which nature had not endowed them was found in the animals they domesticated to serve them. But how can you conquer the world on an empty stomach? The invention of agriculture transformed the future of the wild animals scavenging for food that were humankind. Agriculture turned their history on end. Agriculture was their first great revolution. Developed barely 8,000 to 10,000 years ago, it changed their relationship to nature. It brought an end to the uncertainty of hunting and gathering. It resulted in the first surpluses and gave birth to cities and civilizations. For their agriculture, humans harnessed the energy of animal species and plant life, from which they at last extracted the profits. The memory of thousands of years scrabbling for food faded. They learned to adspt the grains that are the yeast of life to different soils and climates. They learned to increase the yield and multiply the number of varieties. Like every species on Earth, the principal daily concern of all humans is to feed themselves and their family. When the soil is less generous and water becomes scarce, humans deploy prodigious efforts to mark a few arid acres with the imprint of their labor. Humans shaped the land with the patience and devotion that the Earth demands, in an almost sacrificial ritual performed over and over. Agriculture is still the worlds most widespread occupation. Half of humankind tills the soil, over three-quarters of them by hand. Agriculture is like a tradition handed down from generation to generation in generation in sweat, graft and toil, because for humanity it is a prerequisite of survival.But after relying on muscle power for so long, humankind found a way to tap into the energy buried deep in the Earth. These flames are also from plants. A pocket of sunlight. Pure energy, the energy of the sun, captured over millions of years by millions of plants more than a hundred million years ago. Its coal. Its gas. And above all, its oil. And this pocket of sunlight freed humans from their toil on the land. With oil began the era of humans who break free of the shackles of time. With oil, some of us acquired unprecedented comforts. And in 50 years, in a single lifetime, the Earth has been more radically changed than by all previous generations of humanity. Faster and faster. In the last 60 years, the Earths population has almost tripled, and over two billion people have moved to the cities. Faster and faster.Shenzhen, in China, with its hundreds of skyscrapers and millions of inhabitants, was just a small fishing village barely 40 years ago. Faster and faster.In Shanghai, 3,000 towers and skyscrapers have been built in 20 years. Hundreds more are under construction. Today, over half of the worlds seven billion inhabitants live in cities. New York. The worlds first megalopolis is the symbol of the exploitation of the energy the Earth supplies to human genius. The manpower of millions of immigrants, the energy of coal, the unbridled power of oil. Electricity resulted in the invention of elevators, which in turn permitted the invention of skyscrapers. New York ranks as the 16-th largest economy in the world. America was the first to discover, exploit and harness the phenomenal revolutionary power of black gold. With its help, a country of farmers became a country of agricultural industrialists. Machines replaced men. A liter of oil generates as much energy as 100 pairs of hands in 24 hours, but worldwide only three percent of farmers have use of a tractor. Nonetheless, their output dominates the planet. In the United States, only three million farmers are left. They produce enough grain to feed two billion people. But most of that grain is not used to feed people. Here, and in all other industrialized nations, its transformed into livestock feed or biofuels(生化燃料). The pocket of sunshines energy chased away the specter of drought that stalked farmland. No spring escapes the demands of agriculture, which accounts for 70% of humanitys water consumption. In nature, everyt